Derrida performs an almost surgical reading of the notoriously difficult text, marrying pedagogical clarity with patient rigor and acting as a lucid guide through the thickets of Heidegger's prose. At this time in intellectual history, Heidegger was still somewhat unfamiliar to French readers, and Being and Time had only been partially translated into French. Here Derrida mostly uses his own translations, giving his own reading of Heidegger that directly challenges the French existential reception initiated earlier by Sartre. He focuses especially on Heidegger's Destruktion (which Derrida would translate both into "solicitation" and "deconstruction") of the history of ontology, and indeed of ontology as such, concentrating on passages that call for a rethinking of the place of history in the question of being, and developing a radical account of the place of metaphoricity in Heidegger's thinking.

This is a rare window onto Derrida's formative years, and in it we can already see the philosopher we've come to recognize--one characterized by a bravura of exegesis and an inventiveness of thought that are particularly and singularly his.